Cornell College of Business Annual Ithaca Predictions Event

Miguel Gomez

Associate Professor

Cornell University, Dyson School

Miguel I. Gómez is Associate Professor at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. He is a Fellow of the David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell University. He is Affiliate Faculty at the School of Management at Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá.

Research Focus
I concentrate my research program on two interrelated areas under the umbrella of food marketing and distribution:

1. Supply Chains Competitiveness and Sustainability: My work in this area involves multi-disciplinary collaborations and my primary contribution is the development of normative optimization models to assess supply chain performance in multiple dimensions - economic, social and environmental. A growing research area is the development of bioeconomic models to identify profit-maximizing strategies to manage invasive species in agriculture with applications to wine grapes, soft-skinned fruits, and coffee.

2. Retailing and Channel Relationships. Here, I combine microeconomic theory with quantitative methods, emphasizing key concepts such as price transmission, demand response, buyer-seller negotiations, market power, customer satisfaction, and retail performance. In addition, my research in this area extends to economic development. Specifically, I examine the incentives an barriers of smallholder farmer participation in food value chains with emphasis in Latin America.

The scope of my research program is domestic and international, the latter emphasizing food value chains in Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition, my applied research efforts aim at enhancing market opportunities for horticultural products (fruits, vegetables and ornamentals), benefiting producers, food processors/distributors and consumers in New York State.

Selected domestic sponsored research activities include:
- Developing an East Coast Broccoli Industry
- Bioeconomic models of optimal disease control in grapevines
- Enhancing Food Security of Underserved Populations in the Northeast through Sustainable Regional Food Systems
- Challenges Facing Small and Medium Sized Entrepreneurs in Emerging Cool Climate Wine Regions

Selected international research and activities include:
- Sustainability impacts of smallholder farmer participation in specialty coffee value chains in Latin America
- Food value chains and nutritional outcomes in developing countries
- Risk behavior in the adoption of IPM technologies among potato growers in the Colombian Andean Region
- Price transmission and market power in global food supply chains.

Kathy LaTour

Associate Professor and Banfi Vintiners Professor of Wine Education and Management

Cornell School of Hotel Administration

Kathy LaTour is an associate professor of services marketing. She is an expert in the area of marketing hedonic experiences, with a particular focus on wine and gambling. She received her PhD from the University of Iowa in 1997; from 1997-2001, she served as a visiting scholar in the Mind of the Market Lab at the Harvard Business School, where she worked with Gerald Zaltman and Stephen Kosslyn on applications of cognitive neuroscience to marketing; and from 2004 to 2011, she was on the faculty of the UNLV Hotel School, where she taught marketing, marketing research, and a strategic-focused consumer behavior class to undergraduate and graduate hospitality students.

LaTourÔÇÖs research takes a consumer psychological perspective toward how marketers should approach branding, experience design, communications, and loyalty programs. She uses both experimental designs and in-depth interview techniques to better understand consumer behavior, fusing macro cultural and micro psychological dimensions to her research. Her major research focus has been on the complexity of human memory. Her research on memory reconstruction was first published in the top consumer psychology journal, Journal of Consumer Research, and won both best paper for research based on a dissertation as well as best article published in that year (1999), which is a major accomplishment in the discipline. She has published both wine and gambling research in that journal, and her academic research has also appeared in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Business Research, Psychology & Marketing, Journal of Travel Research, Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, and Annals of Tourism Research. Her work has also appeared in the regular news media, such as the New York Times, USA Today, United In-flight magazine, Las Vegas Review Journal, Las Vegas Sun, and Portland Oregonian.

Her current research focus is on the development of knowledge with the highly ambiguous perceptual experienced product of wine; how cross-sensory learning methods can be employed to enhance consumer learning; sensory aspects of branding and brand knowledge representation; and what strategies/knowledge experts (i.e. Masters) use to assess their own tasting experiences. As a means to better understand the nature of expertise, she began her own wine learning journey. In 2011, she received her certified sommelier diploma from the International Sommelier Guild, her sommelier certification from the Court of Master Sommeliers, and Certified Wine Specialist recognition from the Society of Wine Educators. She is currently a student in the Master of Wine program offered through the Institute of Masters of Wine and is studying for her MW, considered to be the highest level of business/wine knowledge in the industry. She has been developing a case-based wine marketing class and is working on several cases and research articles in this area.

LaTour has also worked with a number of consulting companies, such as Experience Engineering and Olson Zaltman Associates, with clients ranging from Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Disney, World Bank, Las Vegas Sands, Yum! Foods. She firmly believes that academic research can inform practice and practice can inform academia.